FULTON — They tracked the storm’s growth on TV, watching fear sweep across the reporters’ faces as they announced each upgraded forecast. Fulton could handle Tropical Storm Harvey, but now it was Hurricane Harvey, building faster than this tiny town’s 1,553 residents could flee.

Harvey crashed its way toward land. Fulton, with its seven town employees and its volunteer fire department, stood first in its path.

All week Fulton had prepared for wind and water. As more than 1,000 people evacuated, a four-man maintenance crew stayed behind, clearing ditches and drainage systems. Firefighters drove door-to-door, boarding homes in last-ditch efforts to give them a standing chance.

But by Friday the 25th, the time to leave had come and passed. The remaining residents — a few hundred of them — had been warned. Harvey grew angry and drew near.

The evacuation orders were mandatory and urgent. But not everybody could escape Harvey’s path. So Fulton’s volunteer firefighters and the four-man crew that the town secretary called “The Fulton Boys” felt obligated to stay behind.

“There’s people who need help who can’t help themselves,” Fulton Supervisor Johnny Davis said. “We all decided to stay.”

As the sky darkened, the maintenance crew circled the town in city-issued trucks, watching whitecaps on Aransas Bay grow taller. The wind whipped rain through cracked-open windows. When it grew too strong around 8 p.m., they checked into two rooms at the local Fairfield Inn. From there, they thought, they would have a good view of the storm.

The 'Fulton Boys,' (L-R) Johnny Davis, Ernesto Garza, Rudy Robles and Matt Olenick, raced against Hurricane Harvey to lead Fulton residents to safety during the eye of the storm.(Photo: Yihyun Jeong/The Republic)

With not much time left until the storm would reach them, the fire department answered last-minute calls for help. They locked themselves inside the station just as the sound of “freight trains doing donuts,” as volunteer Fulton firefighter Matt Jamison described it, surrounded them.

One last call came over the radio. A woman was in distress.

It was too late. The metal doors had already lowered.

Harvey had arrived in Fulton.

Seeking shelter

Harvey came with water, but mostly it brought wind. Gusts blew as fast as 132 mph, a sharp kind of wind that snapped palm trees in half. It stripped leaves from beloved oak trees and turned them into razor blades, slicing across the sliding doors of the Fairfield Inn where the town’s four-man team had taken shelter.

“You could hear the wind,” Davis said, “and it sounded like a hundred cats screaming at the same time.”

The hotel manager knocked on their doors around 11 p.m., when windows started to bulge and water came shooting underneath the front door. The Fairfield, he told Supervisor Matt Olenick, was compromised. They couldn’t stay much longer.

Harvey’s first wave had almost passed. The eye, and the brief moments of calm that came with it, were near.

Olenick, also a volunteer firefighter, called the fire chief. “We need to move,” he said. “How does the station look?”

The metal building housing the department was standing, came the reply. But there was extensive damage to the north portion of the roof. The building was too unsteady to use as shelter.

Next on the list of possible shelters was the Fulton Learning Center, a brick building with solid walls facing the bay. The nurse’s office had cots to sleep on. The building was as sturdy as Fulton offered.

“The eye is here,” a group of stormchasers announced at the hotel. The winds died down, the rain slowed, and the Fulton Boys burst through the front door.

They headed first up State Highway 35, cutting aside flailing power lines and cutting through fallen trees. One block at a time they carved through town, drawing a jagged path between the Fairfield Inn and the Fulton Learning Center.

“We found one good way,” maintenance worker Ernesto Garza said. “And we took that the entire time.”

When a route was cleared to the school, the focus turned to filling it with people.

“We weren’t worried about ourselves,” fire volunteer Jonathan Peters, 30, said. “We knew we had to get out there and help while we could.”

So when calm fell around the Fire Department, the heavy doors were lifted and the crew ran out, piling into every nearby vehicle they could get their hands on.

Fulton volunteer firefighters left the station during the eye of the storm and led Fulton residents to safety.(Photo: Yihyun Jeong/The Republic)

Signs of devastation could already be seen at every corner. They tried to find as many people as possible to relocate to a safer haven. They went door-to-door, canvassing all the homes in the vicinity, shouting for survivors and hoping for word back.

“We were hollering and identifying ourselves,” volunteer Adam Bagley said. “We were trying to hear for people who all stayed behind. We tried our best to make sure no one was left behind.”

Some who had been too stubborn to leave before the storm were still reluctant. They had survived the first wave, Bagley said they told crews. They would take their chances in Round Two.

A man from the hotel told Olenick that a family with three sons and a 6-year-old daughter was stranded in their house behind the Rockport Bakery. He and Davis arrived with an empty truck and an offer to take them to shelter. The family stepfather refused. He wouldn’t abandon their house.

Olenick left them inside and circled the block. When he passed a few minutes later, he saw the rest of the family walking down the highway. The stepfather stayed behind.

This time the family accepted the offer. They scrambled into the trucks stamped with town logos and rode for shelter.

Twenty minutes remained. Harvey’s back wall barreled toward shore as people wandered the streets of Fulton, lured outside by the lull in the storm’s fury. Olenick checked in with his crew and went back to find them. He drove toward an RV park, where a man sat outside his crushed home.

“That’s my house right there,” the man told Olenick when he pulled up.

“You need to get in the truck,” Olenick said. The man climbed in, and Olenick pointed his truck toward the school. But before the RVs were out of view, the man asked about his neighbors, two elderly women living on their own.

Olenick turned around. Harvey’s second wave menaced ever closer.

He knocked on the door to the still-standing home and coaxed the reluctant evacuees into the truck, helping one of the women carry her cat in a cardboard box. Slamming the door shut, he sped the truck across town, over the highway and toward the safety of the school, racing a storm that would never slow.

They were two blocks from shelter when Harvey hit again. The wind gusted and strained to press Olenick off the road, forcing him to turn the steering wheel almost completely sideways.

Slowly the truck struggled forward. Olenick held the wheel as it pulled into the parking lot, where a crew of firefighters awaited. They carried the women inside, slammed the school doors shut and watched through tiny slits in the wall as the storm swallowed Fulton whole.

Rumors of collapse

Rumors flew as Harvey smothered the town.

The Fairfield Inn had collapsed, one resident reported on social media, and Olenick was trapped inside. Another declared that the Fulton Volunteer Fire Department’s building had crumbled.

But neither was true. Harvey moved on, and at the Fulton Learning Center both the firefighters and the Fulton Boys woke from a handful of sleep.

The wind still blew at 40 miles an hour, but it no longer screamed. Rain fell, but didn’t slap against the bricks as it had all night. The worst had passed.

Peters said he didn’t know he was back in his neighborhood until he stepped on a bent street sign on the ground.

“It was just devastating to see my home in this state,” he said.

Olenick tried to call his wife, to tell her he was alive and heading back to work. The storm had knocked out cell phone service.

Emergency radio channels also were unavailable. The crews were limited with shortwave radios to just a few miles. Even then, the single channel was constantly jammed. Everyone was using it.

Crews and the Fulton Boys were faced with a difficult decision: Try to find a signal to assure their families they were OK, or focus on helping victims.

Jamison said they knew they were working against the clock if people were potentially trapped under debris. They had to immediately initiate a large-scale search and rescue operation. Their families would have to wait.

The four-man crew worked to clear the streets, cutting and lugging fallen trees to clear a path so first responders could reach every standing home in town.

For structures no longer standing, crews went in and moved debris by hand to see if anyone needed help.

“No one was going to be left behind,” Bagley said. “No one.”

It wasn’t until the next day, Peters said, that a firefighter caught a cell-phone signal from a highway overpass. He reached a loved one, and in a short, tearful phone call assured her that he was OK. The station roof hadn’t collapsed, he told her.

He asked her to relay the message to the rest of Fulton: The firefighters were alive and at work to save their home.

Picking up the pieces

Harvey churned through most everything of value in Fulton:

The convention center that held the town’s weddings and its swankiest parties.

The nightclub where its young people spent weekend nights.

The pier that Mayor Jimmy Kendrick had covered in green lights.

In addition, two boats sank in the harbor. Nearly every home suffered at least some damage. And the streets of Fulton are marked with piles where other homes once stood.

One Fulton resident died in the storm.

It’s a degree of devastation that could take a small town years to overcome. Fulton has just $304,000 in its town reserves, Kendrick said, and a chunk of that is unavailable for immediate use.

“My town needs humanitarian money,” Kendrick said. “I don’t have reserves. I don’t have a budget like everybody else.”

A week after the storm, the streets of Fulton were dotted with a population in recovery. People stood outside crushed homes, staring at destruction that nobody expected.

Even Fulton’s famed oak trees, which have stood tall and full for a century, are in mourning. Harvey ripped the leaves from their branches, leaving them sagging and barren.

Here, where winter rarely lasts long enough for leaves to fall, few could remember this many empty trees.